


Tell Me A Story

by My_Alter_Ego



Category: White Collar
Genre: AU, Abduction, Beating, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:41:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27683705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/My_Alter_Ego/pseuds/My_Alter_Ego
Summary: Peter and Neal are facing their deaths, and before the end, Peter wants Neal to give an honest accounting of his life. He wants to hear the whole story, and this version differs somewhat from how Peter found out those facts in canon.
Relationships: Peter Burke & Neal Caffrey
Comments: 4
Kudos: 52





	Tell Me A Story

“Tell me a story, Neal,” Peter whispered in a raspy voice.

That was all he could manage to say in his present state after being savagely beaten and practically left at death’s door in a pitch dark room. Neal lay beside him in a similar condition. Both men had been following a lead, in what was thought to be a simple case of mail fraud, when things took a turn for the worse. Their case went south when a co-conspirator promised to turn state’s evidence, but was murdered before he could spill his guts to the FBI. Neal and Peter went in search of the lethal snake in the grass who was responsible, only to discover that the serpent was none other than the Russian mob.

Just last night, the two partners were abducted from Peter’s Taurus, chloroformed, and brought wherever here was. The beatings were not meant to elicit information. They were simply carried out by men who liked inflicting pain. Peter surmised those thugs were just henchmen awaiting their orders. Most likely, in the not-too-distant future, they’d riddle his and Neal’s body with bullets before weighing them down with cement blocks and then slipping them into the East River.

Peter felt Neal move sluggishly beside him, so he asked once again, “C’mon, Buddy, tell me a story. Don’t let me die wondering about the real you.”

“Peter, are you concussed?” Neal hissed back in obvious pain. “You know everything there is to know about me.”

“That’s not really true,” Peter disagreed. “I only know the trivial tidbits you want to tell me when it suits your agenda.”

“What difference does any of that make now?” Neal said tiredly. “We’re going to die very soon.”

“Is this Neal Caffrey denying there’s always another way?” Peter pushed.

“This is Neal Caffrey being a realist,” the other man insisted. “I always knew one day I’d draw the short straw, so I guess on some level, I’ve been preparing for this my whole life.”

“That’s exactly what I want to hear about—your whole life, not just the part when you appeared on my radar,” Peter cajoled. “C’mon, Partner, I’m literally a captive audience, so don’t leave me hanging by callously denying me my last wish.”

“Peter, why is it so important to you?” Neal asked sullenly. “It’s over and done and has nothing to do with the here and now.”

Peter was not to be deterred. “Look, we can call it a fable or a fairy tale, instead of a tell-all autobiography, if that makes it any easier for you. I’ll be the only one who’ll ever hear it, and, obviously, I’ll take your saga to my grave.”

After a few minutes, Peter felt Neal sag listlessly against his side. “Fine! I’ll grant you your dying wish. Once upon a time,” he began in a singsong voice, “there was a fictional little boy born in Washington, DC. Like most new infants, he began his life with a doting mother and father.”

“What was that little boy’s name?” Peter interrupted.

“Strangely enough, his first name was Neal, just like mine, but his last name was different.” After a brief pregnant pause, Neal decided to continue. “Actually, his full name was Neal George Bennett.”

“Okay, so did Neal George Bennett grow up in the nation’s capital?” Peter next wanted to know.

“No, he didn’t,” Neal answered slowly. “When he was just three years old, he went to live with his mother in another city with a golden arch that had nothing to do with McDonald’s.”

“St. Louis—was it St. Louis, Neal?” Peter quickly asked.

“Peter, if you keep interrupting, I’ll never get through this bedtime story before it’s lights out for us,” Neal scolded.

“Okay, okay, but just one more,” Peter wheedled. “You said that Neal went to a new city with his mother. What happened to his father?”

“Now there’s the question,” Neal replied. “At first, a little boy was told that his father was a very brave man who had died in the line of duty. I guess I should mention that a mother told her son that his Dad had been a policeman.”

“So, I would imagine that a loving Mom did that to preserve a good impression for her child,” Peter murmured. “Sorry, not interrupting, just stating an opinion.”

Peter felt Neal tense a bit. “She was a good mother, or as good as she could be under the circumstances. Maybe she couldn’t live with the absence of a life partner, or maybe she couldn’t live with a deceit that she had fostered. But, either way, she just seemed to stop living at all.”

“She didn’t …?” Peter couldn’t finish that sentence.

“Were you going to ask if she killed herself, Peter? No, let me reassure you that she didn’t end her life. She took a different route by not really living it in any way that mattered. I guess, if a modern-day shrink were to label what ailed her, it would be profound depression that rendered her dysfunctional.”

“That must have been very hard for a little boy to endure during his formative years,” Peter tried to keep a sympathetic tone from his voice.

“He managed; he always managed. But it was a lonely existence with a heavy burden. Children shouldn’t have to become a parent to their own parent.”

“How long did this man/child stay in St. Louis shouldering this tremendous responsibility all by himself?” Peter whispered, hoping that would allow him to connect the dots.

Neal sighed. “Until he was 18 years old. He had planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter the police academy. But then one of his father’s contemporaries finally had the guts to tell him that his old man had murdered a fellow officer and went on the run. He wasn’t dead and he was no paragon of integrity. He was a cad who had abandoned his wife and his child to save his own skin. He lived whatever life he then created for himself while his family languished in WitSec. Some role model—right?”

“That must have been a real psychological blow to a young boy on the cusp of manhood,” Peter said gently.

“Well, he may have been disillusioned and resentful, but he managed,” Neal answered succinctly.

“You keep saying this fictional kid ‘managed.’ What exactly did that entail?” Neal’s listener questioned.

“He decided to take control over his own life. Maybe he did follow in his father’s wake because he did exactly what his father had managed to do. He ran and ran until he was far away for a life lived in a soap bubble.”

“To New York?”

“Yep, and eventually to other places around the world,” Neal admitted. “Maybe it was just in his DNA or maybe he wanted to prove that he could do better than his father, a shameful excuse for a man who had been taking illegal payoffs that ultimately led to murder. Maybe that’s why our young lad came to hate guns and any type of violence. Anyway, it wasn’t about committing crimes, at least not at first. But our young antihero knew he was smart, and it wasn’t long before necessity made him start taking advantage of situations so he could have enough money to buy food and pay rent. Then it sort of took on a life of its own because the cons and scams got bigger and better.”

Neal was silent for several long minutes before Peter prodded. “That’s the beginning of the story, but we both know there’s so much more.”

Neal tried to sit up a little straighter. “Yeah, yada, yada, yada. The FBI began pursuing him for stuff like theft, fraud, forgery, money laundering, and even a few Ponzi schemes. The charges may have been true, but he had one thing going in his favor. Our criminal never threatened or physically hurt anyone, and he never stole from anybody who couldn’t afford it. Sometimes, the people he scammed were just as nefarious as he had become. Unbelievably, it really is possible to con a con.”

“But eventually someone clipped this little bird’s wings,” Peter tried to keep from sounding smug.

“Only because our villain was really a lover rather than a fighter. He had fallen head over heels for a girl, and no sacrifice would be too great for him to make on her behalf.”

“Did she love him back?” Peter was almost afraid to make Neal face some questionable intent on Kate’s end.

“Yes, she did, or he’d like to believe that was true,” was the melancholy answer. “I guess he may never really know because he had screwed up and trusted the wrong people. Even the supposedly upstanding guys could be more evil than him. Talk about a dichotomy!”

“So, trust issues,” Peter mused. “Surely, somewhere along the way he had encountered someone that he may have believed in besides any cohorts with a similar agenda,” Peter probed.

“Perhaps there may have been a benevolent older woman who treated him like a son, or a short, bald, somewhat quirky little friend,” Neal spooled out slowly. “But I guess that’s not what you wanted to hear.”

“I’m not fishing for any additional characters that warrant accolades; I’m just certain there’s more to this story,” Peter shrugged, making pain waves surge through his shoulder. “Did this young man ever regret anything? Did he ever look back and wish he had done things differently?”

“Of course, hindsight is 20/20,” Neal agreed. “But perseverating on ‘could haves,’ ‘should haves,’ and ‘would haves’ are cold comfort in the dark of night. I hate to use that word again, but somehow our character with the fatal flaw ‘managed.’ He just kept putting one foot in front of the other. One could say he led a complicated existence.”

“I guess there’s a bit of truth in that statement,” Peter agreed.

Then Neal, the story teller, managed a segue in his tale. “Did you know, Peter, that our criminal hero once stole a painting by Raphael called _‘St. George and the Dragon,’_ from the National Museum in Washington?”

“I may have heard that gossip around the office watercooler a time or two,” Peter played along.

“Yeah, well, the reason he did it was because his true love had said it was her favorite. So, what could he do but chivalrously obtain it for her,” Neal continued. “But the thief liked that painting, as well. St. George is depicted as a formidable presence in full armor sitting atop a magnificent white steed. He’s wielding a long lance with the tip subduing the wicked dragon writhing on the ground at the horse’s feet. He represents a victory of good over evil.”

“Okay, I get that,” Peter felt a bit confused by the disjointed turn in the story.

Peter actually heard Neal sigh. “Well, as dumb as it sounds, the FBI agent who was relentlessly pursuing our very wicked antihero suddenly became St. George in a young idiot’s mind. Good versus evil. There’s a certain synchronicity to it, don’t you think?”

“Neal, you are not evil—you never were,” Peter abandoned all pretense about a fictional story. “You were emotionally needy, immature, misguided, and disillusioned at first. As a young adult, those feelings morphed into rash arrogance. And, unfortunately, you were too smart for your own good. But you didn’t have a malevolent bone in your body, and that’s still true.”

Peter heard Neal sigh. “I guess it’s good to know I have some redeeming features in your eyes.”

Now it was Peter who was sighing. “Neal, if I had encountered you earlier in your hard scrabble life, maybe things would have turned out differently. Nonetheless, I think we’ve managed to get to a point where I hope there is real trust. I don’t want to be a paragon, or an ideal, or St. George. I want to be your friend and equal, not your overseer or your rival.”

“Too bad we’re not going to be around to create an epilogue to the story so we can see how it all turns out,” Neal breathed out softly. “To be brutally frank, the end will be left dangling when they find our bodies. But that won’t encompass the whole saga, will it? I think I’ve always suspected the direction our relationship was taking as soon as you got me out of prison. Either consciously or subconsciously, you were following a serpentine roadmap to a place where you imagined yourself as a father figure to me.”

“Let me guess, Neal,” Peter replied. “You’re not too happy about that concept.”

“Well, just let me say that it’s unnecessary,” Neal answered. “One father in the mix is actually one too many. But if you want the honest truth, I appreciate what you were trying to do. I want you to know that I have come to admire and trust you, as paradoxical as it sounds.”

“Maybe I already do know that,” Peter whispered back before each man fell silent, mired down in their own deep thoughts about their openly truthful admissions. There was really nothing more to say and, eventually, they let oblivion overwhelm them in their wait for the end to come.

The finale to their story actually ended with a bang instead of a whimper because another tale, very mythological in nature, began to unfold. Like the fabled Norse war god, Odin, Clinton Jones charged into the fray with Diana Berrigan as his avenging Valkyrie. Their army of like-minded minions clad in full-battle dress made sure the skirmish was swift and lethal. It was only after the smoke cleared that they gently removed their fallen comrades from the arena of combat.

~~~~~~~~~~

Peter awoke to sunlight, and after gazing around him in confused stupefaction, he discovered he was in a bed adjacent to one where Neal was leaning back on a stack of pillows. There were IV poles located in a sort of no man’s land and call buttons were clipped to white sheets, so the word “hospital” solidified in Peter’s mind rather than “morgue.”

“You look like hell,” was the first thing he managed to croak out as he took in all the purple bruises and jagged lacerations on his young partner’s once handsome face.

Neal gave a cynical snort. “Take a gander in the mirror, Buddy. You look like you went a few rounds with George Forman in his heyday before hitting the canvas.”

“So, we’re not dead,” Peter mumbled the obvious.

“Nope, not yet, at least,” Neal answered. “Which brings up a rather delicate subject.”

“Which is?” Peter’s brain might not be firing on all cylinders yet, but he thought he might know where this was going.

“Yes, well, let’s talk literary works, even though they are, as yet, unpublished in written form,” Neal drawled. “I know how you love to read the fine print on everything, so most assuredly, you’ve run across the caveat that appears on the front page of every book. It states that a copyrighted version of a story maintains all rights preserved by the author, and no part may be reproduced in any form without the express permission of that author.”

“Neal, you haven’t copyrighted anything,” Peter argued.

“You don’t know that for a fact, Peter,” Neal grinned wickedly. “Do you really want me to sue you for copyright infringement? Hughes won’t be too happy about that little hiccup.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want a blot in my copybook,” Peter smiled back. “So, my lips are sealed. All your secrets are safe with me.”

“Good to know,” Neal finally let himself relax because he was still alive and his best friend and confidant was just four feet away. Yep, there was a certain comforting synchronicity to it.


End file.
